A new tool for choosing baby names based on which website addresses are
available is catching on - but has our internet obsession gone too far?

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, where people still spent more time choosing the family car than the baby’s buggy and Mumsnet was something she used to keep her hair out of the way whilst baking a Victoria sponge, parents gave barely a passing thought to the naming of their offspring.

If it was a boy, he would be called after Daddy or Grandad; a girl would become the latest Margaret or Mary in a long line of solid dependable maternal monikers. As families spread out and the media seeped into every aspect of our lives, traditional names became usurped by those of our favourite actors or perhaps something French to suggest an air of sophistication, before coming full circle with a recent deluge of Maudes and Alfies.

And now there’s a new trend in town. When choosing a name for junior, one simply must make sure it is domain friendly.

Yes, that’s right, the most important thing about a child’s name is not whether it goes with the surname, would be inconspicuous on the register at Eton, or is easy to spell, but whether or not there is an available website domain to fit it.

And this being the 21st Century, a handy internet tool called "Awesome Baby Name", has launched this week to help you find such a domain friendly identity. At the click of a mouse, you simply tap in your surname, whether or not you are expecting a boy or a girl, and Awesome Baby Name comes up with 10 suggestions for names that would allow you to also buy an accompanying website domain along the lines of firstnamelastname.com.

It seems guaranteed to make an already fraught business even more complicated for a generation of parents for whom the criteria for baby’s name makes the Middle East peace process look straightforward.

As the average age at which a mother gives birth to her first child has risen to 29.8, most of us have seen the pool of possible names shrink dramatically by the time we have ruled out the names of exes, anyone who ever picked on us at school, beat us in a sports race or had the temerity to outperform us in a career.

When you also dismiss any names your friends have already nabbed, you can see why some parents are still agonising over the decision long after mother and baby have returned home from the hospital.

I know of one set of parents who have yet to announce the name of their newborn, four weeks after his birth, and another still undecided about the names of their twin daughters at a similar age – despite both sets knowing which sex they were expecting.

Perhaps, then, Awesome Baby Name will help focus the mind. Although it began as a joke, dreamt up by Californian dancer Karen Cheng – so annoyed that her common first name meant she never stood a chance of owning the domain karencheng.com – some 6,000 parents used it on its first day.

So, in the interests of journalistic research – and because my name also is so bog-standard I had to add my four digit gym locker code onto the end of it just to get a hotmail address that wasn’t already taken – I decide to give it a go.

Just seconds after typing in my married surname (Paker), the names "Byrnlee" (euch) or "Daniella" (ugh) appear in the first 10, which would guarantee my daughter her own firstnamelastname.com domain.

I am surprised something as ordinary as Daniella features but decide this is probably because my husband’s surname is quite unusual. But Byrnlee belies the site’s American origins – a fact confirmed when I try again using the surname Chalmers - and this time, for a boy I am offered "Crosby", "Jesus" or "Jaxton"!

Before I know it, I have whiled away half a morning typing in the surnames of most of my friends and guffawing at the ludicrous names they could have called their infants – just to secure a website domain.

After the first 10 names are proferred free, the tool invites you to ask for 100 more, at a cost of $3 (£1.78), and also handily directs you to namecheap.com, where you can purchase your chosen domain before some other sad sap beats you to it.

Alternatively you could save yourself the bother and do as I did: only consider reproducing with men who have unusual surnames.